Abstract
Ongoing pest and disease outbreaks pose a serious threat to human, crop, and animal life, and emphasize the need for constant genetic discoveries that could serve as mitigation strategies. Gene drives are genetic engineering approaches discovered decades ago that allow a quick, Super-Mendelian dissemination of genetic modifications in wild populations, offering hopes for medicine, agriculture, and ecology in combating diseases. Following its first discovery, several selfish genetic elements were identified, and several gene drive mechanisms that could attain relatively high threshold population replacement have been proposed. This review provides a comprehensive overview on the recent advances in gene drives research with a special emphasis on CRISPR-Cas gene drives, the technology that has revolutionized the process of genome engineering. Herein, we discuss the benefits and caveats of this technology and place it within the context of natural gene drives discovered to date and various synthetic drives engineered. Later, we elaborate on the strategies for designing synthetic drive systems to address resistance issues, and the adapted approaches towards their containment. Lastly, we highlight the major applications of synthetic CRISPR-based gene drives in different living organisms including plants, animals, and microorganisms.
